Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Solidarism, IV: True Solidarity

We had one more posting in last year’s series on solidarism
that we interrupted in order to present the series on Thomas à Becket.It’s a bit of a tag-end, but here it is:

The Thomist concept is that solidarity does not consist of
subsuming individual consciousness into the group mind, but that it is a
characteristic of groups as groups: a common acceptance of the principles that
define a particular group as that group and no other.People in groups achieve solidarity by
accepting and internalizing the natural law principles that define the group as
that group, and organizing the structure of the group to achieve optimal
exercise of individual rights in a manner consistent with the common good. (Richard E. Mulcahy, S.J., “Heinrich Pesch,
S.J., 1854-1926” Social Order, April,
1951, 166.)

With Leo XIII, Pesch believed that private property in
capital is essential to vest people with the power to exercise individual
rights, particularly liberty, that is, free association and contract.This is to enable people to acquire and
develop virtue individually, but also to organize effectively for social change
so they can meet their own needs through their own efforts within a justly
structured common good maintained by the State. (Ibid.) As explained by Jacques E. Yenni, S.J. (1911-1994),

The
attainment of their private material welfare by individuals and private social
units, such as families, is a matter of double causation.It must be the immediate product of their own self-responsible efforts and
initiative.And it is, secondly, the mediate product of the public material
welfare.

Thus,
individuals and non-public social groups have the direct responsibility for realizing their private material welfare.(Heinrich Pesch, S.J., Lehrbuch der Nationalöconomie. Freiburg i. Br., Herder, 1924,
2.289, 2.316, 3.286. [Note in text.]) To allow for self-responsibility, social
economy must be organized on a basis of private enterprise and considerable
freedom to compete in productive activity and in the determination of one’s
consumption pattern. (Ibid., 2.316,
5.123.[Note in text.]; Jacques Yenni,
S.J., “Pesch’s Goal of the Economy” Social
Order, April 1951, 172.)

As did Leo XIII, however, Pesch simply assumed individual
ethics and social ethics are equally true, and true in the same way, and that
individual life and social life, including economics, can therefore be
reconciled.He did not, however (any
more than did Leo XIII), explain how they were to be reconciled.Nor did he explain how people without past
savings can become capital owners without redistribution, other than by having
employers pay higher wages — which is a convoluted form of redistribution. (Vide Michael D. Greaney, “Heinrich Pesch
on Property: Solidarism and the Just Third Way,” Parts I and II, Social Justice
Review, March-April 2004 and May-June 2004.)

Consequently, after the first generation of students of
Pesch was dead, commentators reverted to a form of solidarism that conforms
more to the thought of Durkheim than to that of Pesch. (Vide Rupert J. Ederer, Economics
as If God Matters: More Than a Century of Papal Teaching.Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2011.) Pesch’s
work is now used in many cases chiefly to support concepts directly at odds
with the natural law and explicit Catholic teaching. (Cf. James Hitchcock,
“Abortion and the Catholic Right,” Human
Life Review, Spring 2007.)